Chameleon Launcher, a highly anticipated launcher replacement for Android tablets, has just released the initial beta version of the app into the Play Store. While everyone with a compatible device can download it, you will need to have an invitation, whether from your Kickstarter pre-order or pre-registration (say, if you're a member of the press or a private beta tester).

If you think you're part of the private beta, head over here (replace YOUR_EMAIL with your pre-reg email address and YOUR_NAME with your name) and associate your registration email with your Play Store account, then grab the app from the Play Store and fire it up.

Update: Even though the registration page mentions Kickstarter, according to our commenters it seems not all, if any, Kickstarter pre-registrations have been added to the pool yet. We've reached out to Teknision for a clarification.

Update #2: We received a response from the company:

The email that is sent out to people are unique emails with encoded headers. People who don't get the email directly from us mean they have not been added to our database yet and have not been notified. That page is auto-populated based on the encoded header, this is for distribution security reasons.

We have only sent out innovations to a select group of people in order to test our verification system and assess server load. We will be staggering the invitations over the next week in order to gauge and manage server load. Our beta release list has about 7000+ people on it to give you an idea of why we are being cautious.

The reasons for the stager is to make sure 7000+ people are not instantly locked out if your server fails. At the bottom of the email we not that this is a unique email for that specific email address.

Sorry for the confusion.

Welcome to the Chameleon Beta

The Beta is here, and we are excited that it is finally in your hands so that we can get your feedback. There is still a lot that we are working on, features to add, and performance issues to address.

Our beta release is for testing out the core Chameleon system as well as the HTML5 widget platform. Bellow are what we are looking for from our Beta release.

What we want you to test

The purpose of the Chameleon Beta is to get a better understanding of how Chameleon works and performs on a larger variety of tablets. What we are looking for is device specific problems, as well as general Chameleon usage issues and bugs.

We are also looking at how well our Chameleon HTML5 widget platform works. Included in the Chameleon Beta are 5 different HTML5 widgets. We are looking for problems related to our caching system, integrated oAuth multi service system, as well as general widget and service errors.

Break it, Break it, Break it

Breaking Chameleon is the best thing you can do. If you can't break it, well then you aren't testing it hard enough. We want/need you to push Chameleon as hard as you can. If you don't we can't improve it. Since our team is so close to the project its hard for us to come up with every possible use case since we tend to use it how we see it being used. But some people have crazy ideas, and we want to know what those are.

Fixes and Updates

During the beta period we will be addressing submited bugs as well as usability concerns. We are looking to do weekly releases with fixes and tweaks. These updates will go out through the Google Play Store and we will be outlining what issues we have fixed, outstanding issues we are working on, as well as any interfaces tweaks on The Beta Lab blog.

We'll be bringing you a full [p]review of Chameleon once we play around with it for a bit and form an opinion. In the meantime, here are some initial screenshots from our Nexus 7: